


Found Patterns in Shattered Pottery

by VioletDarkbloom



Series: Broken Pottery [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Love, M/M, Mentioned suicide attempts, No Mary, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, Post-Reichenbach, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 11:39:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1509089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletDarkbloom/pseuds/VioletDarkbloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The door makes a sound as it opens, which means that John’s meant to know that he isn’t alone anymore.  It can’t have been more than an hour since the violin stopped screeching and let him sleep, so he’s not here in the room so much as here in the bed, which is warm.  The door woke him, but the cool air on his face orients him, and he groans.<br/>--</p><p>Sherlock has been back for two months, and John is still angry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Found Patterns in Shattered Pottery

The door makes a sound as it opens, which means that John’s meant to know that he isn’t alone anymore. It can’t have been more than an hour since the violin stopped screeching and let him sleep, so he’s not here in the room so much as here in the bed, which is warm. The door woke him, but the cool air on his face orients him, and he groans.  
  
“What?” he says, because indulgence is for daytime.  
  
“I’m cold.”  
  
He’s slow at organising the words into the commands that are always hidden in Sherlock’s subtext.  
  
“So turn up the heat,” he says, his voice rough. “I know you know how.”  
  
He’s managed a light doze when an impatient exhale brings him back.  
  
“Ambient temperature above eighteen-point-three-repeating will compromise—“  
  
“Don’t care,” he says. He hasn’t quite finished turning away when a worry forms fast and has him clutching his blanket and saying, “Don’t think of taking any of my bedding.”  
  
The sound of breathing behind him has become distracting. He ought to turn back but doesn't. Then there’s pulling and heat and then cold down his bare legs. “I said don’t take—“ he says, and then he closes his mouth with no plans to open it again. The breathing is close to his ear now, ragged but still somehow soothing. To be sure that he isn’t imagining, he slides one leg backward until it hits soft cotton.  
  
“Sherlock,” he says, and then he clears his throat because it seems right, “you’re in my bed.”  
Sherlock does not criticise him for stating the obvious. Sherlock clears his own throat, and that’s silly because it is increasingly clear that _the right thing to do_ will never be Sherlock’s area.  
  
“I’m cold,” says Sherlock.  
  
“You’re repeating yourself,” says John.  
  
“Well.”  
  
They aren’t touching, so Sherlock must be half hanging off the bed. John scoots forward but doesn’t turn, and he hears Sherlock adjust in the space he’s left. It’s certainly warmer now, but the drowsiness has left the room.  
  
“This is about tonight,” says John. “When you thought.” He doesn’t let the sentence fade but instead chops it short deliberately.  
  
“It would have been my fault,” says Sherlock, and the trajectory of the night changes.  
  
“We know how the Great Sherlock Holmes hates making mistakes,” says John. He’s hated Sherlock for nearly two months, but, apart from a predictable punch thrown thoughtlessly and taken back before Sherlock had even explained about the snipers, this is the first time he’s let himself express it.  
  
Sherlock skips his turn in the conversation, lying still and breathing shallow, so John searches for something else to say while he’s still angry enough to be honest.  
  
“Perfectly clear you’ve no idea what it really feels like to think you’ve lost a friend,” says John. “Oh, I’m sure those three minutes tonight were just hell for you, thinking I'd been killed because of your mistake. What would the papers say, can you imagine? ‘Sherlock Holmes Capable of Human Error,’ my god.”  
  
Sherlock’s breathing has evened, and John wonders whether he’s fallen asleep. Typical that he’d lose his self-control and Sherlock would just sleep through it.  
  
“I wish you’d thought so longer,” says John. “That I was dead. I’d like to see whether you’d even care.” No, now his voice is thick and he’ll have to stop before he embarrasses himself. But the skin on his face is still cold, and under the blankets, his body is warm and tense.  
“You know I tried to kill myself,” says John. “I’m sure you know. I was in hospital, I’m sure you know that. Because I didn’t want, I didn’t, I couldn’t without.”  
  
“I couldn’t,” says Sherlock.  
  
“Yeah you could,” says John. “All you had to do was come get me. All you had to do was come back.” Sherlock starts to speak and stops politely when John says, “Dying didn’t save me, anyway. You ought to have let him shoot me.”  
  
It’s too much now, and they won’t be able to come back from it in the morning. John hates himself for it, for ruining it now that he’s not alone anymore, and he wants to take it back but he can only cry like a child.  
  
Sherlock waits because he knows he should. That’s clear. He waits before he says, “I don’t know whether it’s right to tell you now.”  
  
“What do you care?” says John, but then he says, “Tell me what?”  
  
“St Petersburg, Dar es Salaam, a park in Prague, and somewhere outside Jerusalem, I think, but I was disoriented so it could even have been Haifa.”  
  
John hates himself, but he turns over. Sherlock is on his back, stiff and straight and looking up in the dim light. John waits because he hopes it will hurt Sherlock.  
  
“St Petersburg, I thought I was close and realised I was wrong. Mycroft’s agent got to me with Narcan, and I had to break out of a guarded hospital in Kiev after. I was weak about it in Dar es Salaam and tried to provoke police, but they were cleverer than I expected. In Prague, I took a dirty needle off a dead junkie and shot up everything he had—“  
  
“Sherlock, stop.” But everything stops instead, except tingling in John’s fingers and on his tongue. His extremities all throb three times before he can speak again. “You mean you tried to commit suicide,” he says.  
  
“No,” says Sherlock.  
  
“Then I don’t—“  
  
“If I’d really tried, I’d have succeeded.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“I wanted to, though,” says Sherlock. His voice is very small. “I tried to try.”  
  
“Me too,” says John.  
  
“To punish yourself,” says Sherlock, and John laughs.  
  
“No, you idiot. Is that why you did?”  
  
“Maybe. I don’t know.” It’s enough to make them both blink. “Why, if not to punish yourself?” says Sherlock.  
  
“I told you.”  
  
“Ridiculous.”  
  
John pushes himself onto his palms and brings himself very close to Sherlock’s face.  
  
“Don’t you ever fucking tell me it’s ridiculous to love you,” he says. Sherlock chokes on his own saliva. “That’s what I meant,” says John, watching Sherlock cough into his own fist. “That’s why I couldn’t live without you. So don’t fucking compare your bruised ego to what I went through while you were gone.”  
  
Sherlock’s response is ruined by coughs.  
  
“I’m glad you told me about the dirty needle,” says John. Sherlock tilts his head in question. “Otherwise I might have done something stupid,” says John. Sherlock exhales shakily and then turns onto his side, his back to John. John presses against him and drapes his arm. “All I’ve wanted from the minute you came back was to hurt you,” he whispers.  
  
“Yes,” says Sherlock. John holds him closer.  
  
“I wasn’t asking for your permission.”  
  
John knows the sound he hears is Sherlock crying, but he can’t believe it. He brings their bodies as close together as he can and imagines Sherlock lying boneless in a park in Prague. The heat that localises in his groin brings guilt, and he punishes himself by imagining Sherlock choking on vomit.  
  
“Have you been tested?” John asks. Sherlock laughs once.  
  
“Repeatedly,” he says. “The junkie was negative, but Mycroft insisted on a 28 day cycle of emtricitabine and tenofovir anyway. It was the only time I ever used a dirty needle.”  
  
John’s organs have liquidated and are bubbling out of his orifices. Metaphorically. Sherlock is talking about side effects, and his words are slipping like fish in John’s ears. Sherlock should not be made of flesh. Sherlock should be impervious. Sherlock should be alabaster.  
  
“—vomit in the middle of a murder,” says Sherlock. He’s stopped crying but is still facing away. “I find it reduces the efficacy of torture.” John repeats the word “torture” in a voice that makes Sherlock tense. “Yes,” says Sherlock. “When necessary.”  
  
John puts his lips against Sherlock’s body for the first time, on his shirt near the top of his thoracic curve. Sherlock breathes deep and then finds the hand John has draped over him, pressing it to his own chest.  
  
“Sherlock,” John says, and then he laughs briefly in embarrassment.  
  
“I deserve it, if you want to hurt me.”  
  
“Because of the torture,” John says, praying Sherlock will know and say the right response.  
  
“Because of what I did to you,” says Sherlock, and warm relief loosens John’s exhausted intercostal muscles. Sherlock feels the release, of course, and he turns toward John and laces their fingers. “I hate this,” he says. “I hate every second of it.”  
  
“Which part?”  
  
“This,” says Sherlock, shaking their linked hands. “Sentiment.”  
  
“So let go,” says John, and Sherlock doesn’t.  
  
“It isn’t because you’re anything special,” says Sherlock.  
  
“Of course not,” says John. “What isn’t?”  
  
“Why I love you.”  
  
John squeezes Sherlock’s hand until they’re both wincing.  
  
“So you fall in love with just anyone?” John asks. Sherlock shakes his head.  
  
“Of course not,” he says. “I deserve it if you want to hurt me.”  
  
“I do,” says John, and finally their lips touch and stay, not really a kiss but similar enough in meaning.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, guys!
> 
> My non-fannish writing (which is still quite a lot about Sherlock Holmes) can be found at butlikesowhat.wordpress.com


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